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AI is stifling new tech adoption?

vale.rocks

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Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#271

Post by crazygringo »

TheTaytay wrote: post #268
crazygringo wrote: post #252

No, AI isn't. Any new tech, or version upgrade, or whatever, takes time for people to become familiar with it. You might as well say "Stack Overflow is stifling new tech adoption" because brand-new stuff doesn't have many Q's and A's yet. But that would be a silly thing to say. I'm not going to adopt a brand-new database regardless of LLM training data cutoff, just because enough people haven't had enough experience…

I feel myself taking AI’s base knowledge of a tech stack into account when I work. Otherwise it feels like I am swimming upstream. I can’t be the only one, and this article resonated for me.

Sure, but what I'm saying is that's not where the knowledge bottleneck is.

The knowledge bottleneck is in the human population, which is then reflected in Stack Overflow and blogs, which is then reflected in LLM's.

LLM's aren't doing anything special to stifle new tech adoption. New tech is harder to adopt because it's new tech, because people in general are less familiar with it.

(And there's a little bit of a training delay in LLM's updating, but that's a minor aspect here compared to the years it takes for a new Python package to become popular, for example.)

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#272

Post by janalsncm »

I’ve been out of web dev for a while, but maybe the problem is there’s a new framework every 6 months and instead of delivering value to the end user, developers are rewriting their app in whatever the new framework is.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#273

Post by logifail »

spamizbad wrote: post #118
matsemann wrote: post #86

I actually asked this a while back, but got little response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40263033 > Ask HN: Will LLMs hurt adoption of new frameworks and technology? > If I ask some LLM/GPT a react question I get good responses. If I ask it about a framework released after the training data was obtained, it will either not know or hallucinate. Or if it's a lesser known framework the quality will be worse tha…

It seems self-evident it will, and it's largely self-reinforcing. Less documentation/examples of new tech -> New model doesn't have enough info on new tech to be useful -> Less uptake of new technology -> Less documentation/examples to build a corpus.... I do wonder if this problem could get solved by basically providing documentation explicitly written for LLMs to consume and produce more detailed "synthetic" docume…

> Less documentation/examples of new tech -> New model doesn't have enough info on new tech to be useful -> Less uptake of new technology -> Less documentation/examples to build a corpus....

Q: Could it be that those who aren't relying on ChatGPT (or similar) might have a significant competitive advantage?

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#274

Post by AlienRobot »

>Consider a developer working with a cutting-edge JavaScript framework released just months ago. When they turn to AI coding assistants for help, they find these tools unable to provide meaningful guidance because their training data predates the framework’s release. This forces developers to rely solely on potentially limited official documentation and early adopter experiences, which, for better or worse, tends to be an ‘old’ way of doing things and incentivises them to use something else.

I can't help but feel that a major problem these days is the lack of forums on the Internet, specially for programming. Forums foster and welcome new members, unlike StackOverflow. They're searchable, unlike Discord. Topics develop as people reply, unlike Reddit. You're talking to real people, unlike ChatGPT. You can post questions in them, unlike Github Issues.

When I had an issue with a C++ library, I could often find a forum thread made by someone with a similar problem. Perhaps because there are so many Javascript libraries, creating a separate forum for each one of them didn't make sense, and this is the end result.

I also feel that for documentation, LLMs are just not the answer. It's obvious that we need better tools. Or rather, that we need tools. I feel like before LLMs there simply weren't any universal tools for searching documentation and snippets other than Googling them, but Googling them never felt like the best method, so we jumped from one subpar method to another.

No matter what tool we come up with, it will never have the flexibility and power of just asking another human about it.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#275

Post by bilater »

This is precisely why I have said that every new framework/library should have a markdown or text or whatever is the best format for LLM models endpoint that has all the docs and examples in one single page so you can easily copy it over to a models context. You want to make it as easy as possible for LLMs to be aware of how your software works. The fancy nested navigation guide walkthrough thing is cool for users but not optimized for this flow.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#276

Post by amelius »

This is like saying in the 90s that Google Search would stifle tech adoption ...

I don't buy it. AI can teach me in 5 minutes how to write a kernel module, even if I've never seen one. AI brings more tech to our fingertips, not less.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#277

Post by jonas21 »

spenvo wrote: post #269
jonas21 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be happy to learn that I just asked ChatGPT (the free tier that you can access without signing in) "What does the CurrentKey Stats app do?" and got this back: ---- CurrentKey Stats is a macOS application designed to enhance your productivity by offering detailed insights into your app usage and providing advanced management of your Mac's virtual desktops, known as "Spaces." Key Features: Time Tracking: Unlike…

That's good. When i wrote the article, I was able to get a similar response when i used chatgpt "search", but not with the basic tier default prompt with the prompt "i own a Mac, would currentkey stats be good for me?". Were you using the default chatgpt prompt here or chatgpt "search" or a better model?

I went to https://chatgpt.com, typed "What does the CurrentKey Stats app do?" into the box, and pressed Enter.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#278

Post by cluckindan »

janalsncm wrote: post #272

I’ve been out of web dev for a while, but maybe the problem is there’s a new framework every 6 months and instead of delivering value to the end user, developers are rewriting their app in whatever the new framework is.

Nice stereotype. Does it hold water?

I’ve been using the same backend framework professionally for over 10 years, and the same frontend framework for over 6 years. Clearly your thoughts on the matter are not reflective of reality.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#280

Post by bmurphy1976 »

janalsncm wrote: post #272

I’ve been out of web dev for a while, but maybe the problem is there’s a new framework every 6 months and instead of delivering value to the end user, developers are rewriting their app in whatever the new framework is.

That's only part of the problem. Complexity and expectations have exploded in the last decade, while investment is getting tighter and tighter (for the average corporation anyway, not necessarily the big boys).

The constant frameworks churn is one attempt at solving the complexity problem. Unfortunately I don't think it's working.

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